What We’re Buying in Afghanistan

“The evidence that stabilization programs promote stability in Afghanistan is limited.” That line, from a new Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on the sad uses of American aid there, has the elements of a tongue twister, especially when “sustainability,” the other key word from the findings, is added in: If the stabilization programs don’t bring stability, then how do you sustainably stabilize an unstable state? “We’re not out to, clearly, create a shining city on a hill,” Ryan Crocker, who President Obama has nominated as the new Ambassador to Afghanistan, said in the Senate today, while explaining why we nevertheless have to keep up our war there. But do we have to build a tower of Babel?

The report notes,

The unintended consequences of pumping large amounts of money into a war zone cannot be underestimated.

Those effects include waste, the corruption of government officials, a pool of funds for the Taliban, the distortion of local economies, and “tens of billions of dollars” that mostly just seem to be gone. Sometimes, our plan, or counterinsurgency doctrine, simply seems to have been to put the leaders of a village known for insurgent activity on the payroll. But if instability attracts money, why be stable? And what happens when the money is withdrawn? The cash-as-counterinsurgency model, in the report’s words,

presumes that the international community and the Afghan Government have shared objectives when it comes to promoting longer term development, good governance, and the rule of law.

These assumptions may not be correct.

That may be an understatement. The report describes a certain bind: most of the aid we give is “off-budget,” which means that it doesn’t go through the central Afghan government. That is a bad idea if one’s goal is a strong state that citizens look to for services and competent people look to for careers. But it’s a good idea if there are “significant concerns about weak government capacity and corruption”—and, in the case of the Karzai government, there’s that and more. The report cites a British program that assumed a “limited government presence” in one area was one factor fuelling the insurgency, when in fact “poor governance” was—in other words, the people there weren’t getting too little of the Karzais, but too much of them and their bad behavior.

You can’t spend the amount of money we have without getting something; there are, for example, many more Afghan children in school than there were ten years ago. But these are rented, rather than purchased, gains. We haven’t helped build an education system that looks able to survive the withdrawal of our money, which must come, unless our long-term plan for Afghanistan is to keep paying forever. The report includes this sort of number:

According to the World Bank, an estimated 97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) is derived from spending related to the international military and donor community presence.

Our Afghan war is Afghanistan’s military-aid bubble, with the bulk of the benefit going to élites. The report blames poor oversight of aid money, which was then skimmed off, for the Kabul Bank scandal (see Dexter Filkins’s piece for more of the awful details). We are making some Afghans rich, without making most of them like us or their government any more accountable. It is not clear that we are purchasing much more than complicity in government corruption—which, given what foreign aid really could buy in much of the world, and the political scorn those efforts attract, is tragic.

The necessity and impossibility of a true partnership with the Karzai regime is the central contradiction in our Afghanistan policy. A tongue-twister, or a good one, at least has an internal logic, a thread that keeps you talking no matter how hard it is to stay at. Our war does not. The aid payments we’ve been handing out are amplifiers that make the contradictions starker. But they are also a form of hush money: we pay because we don’t want to hear or talk about how senseless we sound.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.